That Night
by Lady Elina
Summary: What if Sirius had gone to Remus the night James and Lily died? Not an AU. Slash warning.
1. Default Chapter

**Part 1/2: 31.10.1981**

That night he takes me as if it was the last time.

He is standing behind my door fierce, tense, his eyes bright, and doesn't look like himself. The traces on his smooth face look like traces of crying, but they cannot be, because Sirius never cries. He has always been open laughter and quicksilver, my Sirius. He glues the pages of my books together with lockitium spells when he wants to get me away from them. He hides Steamy Greeting Cards in my teapot, and when the water boils, they write such messages on the air that any visitors will blush and choke on their biscuits. Sirius, whom I kissed one winter day under a tree heavy with snow near the edge of the Forbidden Forest, and who has ever since been by my side shadow-like, even though he is not a shadow but made of pure light.

But that night I see immediately everything isn't right. Lately there have been many days and nights when everything hasn't been right. The ring of darkness is tightening around us and squeezing us. We try to live like we should, as if we were happy to be in our early twenties, to have each other and our friends. But our bodies have turned hesitant and angry, they entwine warily, hastily, suspiciously. Fear flows in through doorways and windows as wizards disappear, die and are revealed as allies of the Dark. Even the most familiar face can suddenly be strange and scary. We sleep in each other's arms like in a burning hut in the middle of snow: warm for a while still, but secretly waiting for the moment when we realise our lives are in a danger and there is no way out.

It has been weeks since he has been here. I want to ask where he has been and what is not right. However, he doesn't leave room for questions. He sweeps inside past me and I have hardly closed the door, when he pushes me violently against the wall, presses his slim body tightly to mine. He grabs my hair and exposes my throat, tasting it hungrily, furiously. His lips are shaping my name on my skin, Remus, Remus, and his touch burns as it melts over me. I'm trying to speak questions into the air between us, but they shrivel up, fall apart and fade away as my body responds to his closeness, because he has been away for so long, for too long.

He tastes of salt and wind, and the dark stubble on his chin is coarse below my tongue. Tangled and knotted around each other we somehow stumble our way into the bedroom, his hands all over and mine more so, our hips whipping and beating each other. Less wouldn't be enough, because we don't know if there will be a next time; everything has to be ferocious and memorable. He tears my shirt open and my mind registers fleetingly a button rolling under the bookshelf, but it is soon forgotten. I'm too busy opening his wide leather belt and moving my hand further down, closing my touch around him and admiring the desire on his face as he whimpers with pleasure. And then I sense only the arc of his body and the rhythm of his breath, the blood that flows in us alive, demanding, and the marks we leave on each other's skin.

We make love as if it was the only thing keeping the world together, and as he moves deep inside me, his face is alien again, because Sirius doesn't cry.

I'm sheltered by the slowly descending sleep, but through it I feel his skin drawing from mine as he moves away. I crack my lids slightly open and see him putting on dark velvet trousers and a T-shirt, the muggle clothing he wears under his cloak. I reach my weary hand towards him and stroke the small of his back, his buttocks. He turns around with a smile on his face, but his eyes are not smiling. I try to keep my tone playful, although an unpleasant and suffocating feeling is slowly creeping inside me.

"Padfoot... this time of the night? It's bedtime for good puppies."

He grins, but there is something jagged and painful in the corners of his mouth, in the stir of his eyebrows, as he replies:

"What about naughty ones?"

I slip my fingers through his and stroke the back of his hand with my thumb, saying quietly:

"You should sleep. You need it."

He turns his head and his hair falls in a curtain so for a moment I cannot see his face. Then he looks at me with bright eyes.

"Remus, I'm sorry. I have to go."

"Where?"

"Can't tell you. But I'll come back."

His eyes are too bright, and the flicker on his face is dark and heavy. He moves as if to kiss me, but stops, restraining himself. His fingers brush my cheek quickly and he says:

"Take good care of... everything, Moony."

And then he is gone. I put my palm in the dent he has left in the bed and his warmth is still radiating from it into my fingertips. I'm expecting to hear the sound of a motorbike engine starting, but it is quiet outside. I don't have much time to wonder why he didn't come by his bike, before I fall asleep again.

A clatter behind the window wakes me. The shadow of a bird is floating in the night, its wings beating an alarmed rhythm. Suddenly the darkness is strangling me coldly, spilling into my tired body and forcing it up. I let the owl in and it drops a roll of parchment on the bed. I open it, my fingers stiff with sleep. There is only one line scribbled on the parchment:

_Remus, leave immediately. You know where to go. Be prepared for the worst._

_Dumbledore_

And the cold in my body concentrates into one thought, sharp and icy, that is cutting me up inside.

James and Lily.

And then:

if James and Lily, then also...

Sirius.

No one else knew where they were.

I want to be wrong, I want Dumbledore to tell me that no one has died, or that someone else has died, and no one is a traitor, a spy. But my body is heavy with fear and I know my wish is too much, because why should I be spared, and my friends, when everything is falling apart? Why should we have that privilege, if it is taken away daily from so many others, with no reason, no justification? The realisation is suddenly there clear and irrevocable and it is twisting me asunder so hard I cannot stand up for a moment.

Sirius is somewhere out there, my taste in his mouth, red marks from my nails on his skin, and there are long black hairs of his on my pillow. But he has gone to the Dark Lord and he is not coming back.

Ever.

I'm sitting on the edge of the bed paralysed, and there is no patronus or felicitus strong enough, not any spell strong enough to take this sharp-edged block of ice away from inside of me, they have all disappeared along with him. Slowly I force myself to move. I get dressed. I move one foot ahead of the other one. I step into the night. I take a step. I take another step.

On every step a small piece of the world crumbles away, and nothing is right anymore.


	2. 

**Part 2/2: 5.7.1995**

He has been gone for so long, for too long.

There is only one line in the message:

_A black dog is on its way to see you. Take good care of it until I contact you._

_Dumbledore_

And then Sirius is standing behind my door in his animal form, his fur matted and shineless, his eyes bright in the grey dusk of the night. Suddenly I wish I had a command over the wolf that lives in me, instead of being commanded by it. If I could approach him as an animal, to sniff him from a distance, perhaps nuzzle his fur, to make a sound and nip his neck playfully, I wouldn't need to stand here closed, made of stone and weariness.

Only now does he come to me, more than a year after I saw him in the Shrieking Shack and finally knew I had misunderstood everything that distant night. I pulled him into my arms out of bare relief, held him tight to me, felt the sharp bones under my hands and couldn't believe he was there, alive and precious and familiar and strange. But the moments were short and there wasn't enough time for everything, for anything. He ran with me in the Forbidden Forest as a dog, looking, touching. And afterwards he was gone again.

Now he is standing behind my door and I'm made of stone, mute and still and closed.

He cocks his head, lets out a questioning whimper and pads past me into the house. I close the door after him and when I turn to look, he has already taken his human form. He doesn't move, doesn't speak. He merely stands there and is the same, yet different. Sirius, my Sirius, whom I kissed one winter day near the edge of the Forbidden Forest when the world was still whole for us. Sirius, who was smile and movement and sound and touches and life. Sirius, whose black hair falls now in dull tangles, whose starved body is on the alert every moment, whose eyes are too tormented deep in their dark hollows.

I study his face, each small movement of muscles he is not aware of, shadows left by years, and I feel my own face stir under his gaze. We watch and listen, look for signs of recognition, of trust. We have forgotten how to speak and neither one of us remembers how to move or touch. We stand there, in the semi-darkness of my living room like two mirrors facing each other, repeating each other's reflection endlessly as minutes, hours pass by. Tides roll over the earth and withdraw again, the moon waxes and wanes, the wolf comes and goes in me, but I don't notice. The world spins, but we remain, the grey dusk remains, and the silence remains.

His voice is hoarse and low when he finally breaks the silence, centuries, ages later.

"How's... everything, Moony?"

Only Sirius can speak such a sentence after fourteen dark years. The impossible has come to happen. The wish I never had the courage to shape into a thought has come true, and he is not a traitor after all. I have pressed my palm every night onto the cool sheet next to me, to the spot where he should have been resting, and now he comes and asks me _how's everything_. Only Sirius can say that. It breaks the moment and time swallows us back into its normal flow.

I say the only thing I can. I don't blame, I don't even ask, only state the obvious, and I find myself wondering how I manage to sound just like a teacher who matter-of-factly corrects a mistake in a homework.

"I could have saved you, Sirius. If you had told me before clearing off."

The defiance I remember so well from the school years flashes in his stare but it fades into something that resembles sadness. He is quiet, as if choosing his words carefully before he replies:

"I thought I could do it on my own."

A sudden warmth prickles into me, spreads almost as far as a smile. Of course he thought he could do it on his own. He thought he could do anything. He could have tamed the Dark Lord on his own, fixed all the wrongs of the world, even returned from beyond death. He was twenty-two, he had a flying motorbike and black hair floating in the wind and a lover who would have lived, died and killed for him. He was Sirius Black and the world belonged to him.

His pale face that has grown sharp and bony looks exhausted as he continues:

"Besides, I was sort of upset."

He pauses and a storm sweeps over his face as if he is trying to organise his thought, remember what is important. His words come out in more of a growl than a human voice.

"The Triwizard Tournament was a trap. He tried to help Voldemort kill Harry."

"Wormt... Peter?"

Suddenly the old nickname doesn't seem right anymore, there is too much familiarity, too many good memories linked with it. It cannot be used of Peter whose betrayal has coloured all those memories painful, destroyed from us what could have been. Sirius wants to kill him. I want to kill him. We both know it will not bring anyone back, nor turn the time's flow, nor change anything, but the urge to kill lives in us as an instinct, a blood-thirst that cannot be denied. It is a raw and primitive impulse – kill the enemy, protect yourself and your pack.

Sirius replies my unspoken question, my worried expression:

"Harry's fine. I'll tell you all about it later."

"I wish you'd told me about James and Lily that night."

I don't know why I say it. What good does it do now, who does it help anymore? But the words are spoken, I cannot undo them with a spell.

His face quivers and I know he understands what I mean. Yes, that night. It returned in my dreams all over again, and I wished for those dreams because they gave him back and was afraid of those dreams because they took him away from me again. In those dreams I knew, I knew all the time. He pushed me against the wall and I knew he had just helped to murder James and Lily; his hands were moving on my skin and I knew he would leave and never come back; he entered my body and I knew it would be the last time. And still I let it all happen, because without his touch it would have been even worse.

Now I see on his face that while I have fought my dreams, he has lain awake, stayed awake for years thinking of that night, lived through every day with the knowledge I didn't know the truth.

The wrongfulness of it all flows upon us like chilled water, surrounding and enveloping us.

Like a drowning man he reaches his hand out for me and I realise it is trembling, and I'm trembling. His fingertips are moving on my face, tracing the lines there are too many of, tracing the outlines of my lips that have lost their softness, pushing into my hair that is greyer than that of most people my age. I close my eyes and swallow, holding back whatever wants to break free from inside me.

I grab his wrist and guide his fingertips to my lips. He gasps and trembles, leans in against me and buries his head into my neck, below my ear. I feel his breath concentrate on my skin and his heartbeats against my own chest as his arms clutch my body. He is whispering my name, Remus, Remus, and slowly, uncertainly our faces turn towards each other, carefully, cautiously our mouths draw closer.

The kiss fumbles and searches, our lips are moving lightly, getting used to each other, wondering about the taste and touch that is new yet is not. So many dreams and fantasies of this moment, and still I haven't been able to imagine everything, anything. Not the way I touch him unhurriedly, nor the way he sucks gently at my lower lip, nor the way the salty tears flow onto my tongue where he can taste them too. I'm not sure which one of us is crying.

Nor have I been able to imagine the way he suddenly smiles like only Sirius can, my Sirius.

I'm holding him and thinking that maybe everything can still be right, everything at all. His smile lures a smile out of me too, and the caress of his fingers in the hair of my neck is warm. Little by little the years melt away, never again completely, but for a moment, for an hour, for a day. Outside the grey evening is dissolving into the blue night, the room is quiet in semi-darkness, the world is turning and he is in my arms.

That night I touch him as if it was the first time.


End file.
